1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for managing a work to automatically insert materials, electric and electronic components, into a printed circuit board (PCB) with a programmed computer system, and more particularly to a method for transforming a non-standardized original bill-of-material (BOM) into a standardized BOM which is adjusted to an environment of an assembly line for the PCB.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In work of automatically inserting electric and electronic materials into a PCB by using an automatic insertion machine, a working plan reflecting a particular environment of a PCB assembly line is necessary for high efficiency and reliability of the work.
When preparing the working plan, two important factors should be considered. The first factors is an environment for the automatic insertion machine. The automatic insertion machine is a machine for automatically inserting particular materials into the PCB by using position data on the PCB and insertion order of assigned materials. Characteristics of the automatic insertion machine such as a head size, a moving mechanism of a head, and the BOM to be provided vary according to manufacturers and models. For a correct and fast insertion, these various characteristics of the automatic insertion machine involved in an assembly line should be reflected upon preparing the insertion working plan for the PCB.
The second factor is an assembly environment relating to the BOM. The BOM should be prepared in a standard form so as to be suitable for a particular assembly environment. There are various kinds of materials which are inserted into the PCB, and even an identical kind of material may have different electric and physical characteristics. Besides, the materials to be inserted may arrange from a few ten to a few hundred per PCB, thus it is very important to intelligently plan the work that assigns the materials to respective insertion machines and determines insertion order. However, information on the BOM or a design drawing of the PCB provided from him or her who orders the insertion work is not standardized since it is hard for him or her to know the environment for the assembly line. Accordingly, for effective insertion work, a non-standardized BOM should be transformed into a standardized BOM which is suitable for the environment of the particular assembly line.
Meanwhile, some kinds of materials are not suitable for the automatic insertion with the automatic insertion machine, and these kinds of materials should be manually inserted into the PCB by workers. Accordingly, the amount of materials assigned to respective workers and a working map for these manual insertion materials should be reflected on preparation of the working plan. Besides, in view of a trend of small quantities and large species in manufacturing electric and electronic equipments, a PCB manufacturer is much needed to have capability of speedily and flexibly coping with various and frequent changes of PCB models.